Corporatism and the Microeconomic Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy: The Swedish Model Revisited*

The aim of this paper is to advance the research into the workings of ‘corporatist’ societies by adding a microeconomic dimension and outlining how such a revised model is applicable to recent Swedish experience. Sweden is often regarded as a corporatist society., that is, one in which policy is the outcome of a ‘social partnership’ between encompassing groups coordinated by government. This corporatist approach, resting on the existence of a macro-economic social contract between peak organizations, is complemented here by an analysis of the micro-level incentives and mechanisms conducive to operating within the corporatist cooperative framework. These characteristics are seen as together constituting what I term the solidaristic market economy, a system of economic relations different in fundamental respects from the two with which we are familiar. While Swedish reality docs not correspond exactly to the economic model set out, the case is made that it is as reasonable to extrapolate from Swedish experience to the solidaristic market economy (and vice versa) as to learn from U.S. experience about the competitive market economy and from the Soviet Union about the command economy. Complemented by these micro-characteristics, corporatist analysis of economic relations under social-democratic regimes is thus seen as explaining the resilience of the ‘Swedish model’. Rather than in constant peril as critics suggest, the encompassing interest organizations and the patterns of relations among them are characterized by continued solidity in keeping with the operating principles of the solidaristic market economy.     

‘Democratic Socialism’ and the Concept of (Post)Capitalism

This article explores the ‘democratic socialism’ being proposed by new left movements on either side of the Atlantic, and evaluates its claim to be a form of anti- or postcapitalism. It argues that in the democratic socialist worldview, the line between capitalism and socialism rests on the balance of power between workers and capitalists in the economic sphere. While traditional social democracy seeks to redistribute wealth but leaves relations between workers and capitalists within firms untouched, democratic socialism seeks to abolish private property in the economic sphere. Production is controlled democratically by the workers themselves, in league with a workers’ state. The article critically appraises the claim that such a scenario constitutes a form of postcapitalism. Drawing on the work of critical Marxists such as Moishe Postone, it argues that capitalism is not primarily defined by private property relations in the economic sphere, but rather the peculiar social form of capitalist labour. Unlike in pre-capitalist societies, for labour in capitalism to secure a continued basis on which to reproduce the means of subsistence, it must be socially validated as ‘value-producing’. The criteria for value validation is not set in the workplace, or within a single nation state, but rather on the world market. The article concludes that, for all its merits, the democratisation of workplaces does not overcome the need for this social validation, but rather constitutes an alternative form of managing the process of production in this context. As such, democratic socialism, like social democracy, remains susceptible to the same imperatives and crises as other forms of capitalist production, and so cannot be said to constitute a form of ‘postcapitalism’.     

A ‘Post-Work’ World: Geographical Engagements with the Future of Work

This article reviews geographical research on labour market changes that pose a challenge to ‘work’ as a compelling category of analysis. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship that has sought to develop a frame for thinking about the concept of work so that other activities outside employment are recognised, it considers what everyday practices of work, including domestic and reproductive labour, can teach us about the realities and futures of contemporary capitalism. While ‘work’ has long served as a presumed norm or telos of ‘development’, this article considers the prospect of the ‘end of work’ and of a specific type of accompanying capitalist society. It outlines the challenges for policy making in bringing forth a ‘post-work’ world without cementing social and economic inequality.     

人类劳动能力的普遍发展与平等的实现

依据马克思主义人的自由全面发展理论,人类建立平等的社会关系,归根结底取决于人们的劳动能力的普遍发展。当代新科技革命正在创造着人类劳动能力普遍发展的物质条件,而社会主义市场经济体制正在创造着人类劳动能力普遍发展的社会条件。因此,在新科技革命方兴未艾的时代背景下,社会主义实践者选择建立社会主义市场经济体制既符合生产力决定生产关系规律,也找到了人类实现共同富裕目标的新途径。     

Local Heroes? Learning from Recent Community Strengthening Initiatives in Victoria1

Policies and programs which aim to strength the engagement, connectedness and resilience of local communities have increasingly become a core element in public policy responses to the challenges posed by globalising social and economic relations. However, for many politicians, policy makers and citizens the conceptual framework and practical benefits of ‘community strengthening’ remain vague and unclear. This article aims to contribute to debates about the significance of community strengthening by providing a concise overview of the development and implementation of community strengthening initiatives by the Bracks Labor government in Victoria. Initial learning from this experience suggests that engaging and linking local communities can make a useful contribution to local social, environmental and economic outcomes as well as providing a foundation for the democratic renewal of local governance. Key factors underpinning successful community strengthening programs include strong local ownership and leadership, backed by sustained government investment in the social and physical infrastructure priorities identified as important by local communities. However, while local community strengthening strategies can lead to real improvements in community networks, infrastructure and capacity they are no substitute for the inclusive and redistributive taxation, income security, service delivery and labour market policies needed to create the conditions for sustainable reductions in poverty, inequality and social exclusion.     

Unfree labour and adverse incorporation in the global economy: comparative perspectives on Brazil and India

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of unfree labour in the contemporary global economy, the processes by which it is generated, and its connections with poverty and vulnerability. I challenge dominant ‘residual’ views of unfree labour as either external to global economic activity or occurring solely within small-scale, localized or non-market contexts. Instead, I contend that unfree labour needs to be understood in ‘relational’ terms as a particular form of ‘adverse incorporation’ in the global economy. This form of adverse incorporation is constituted through the circular interaction between, on the one hand, the functioning of the global productive economy and associated labour markets, and, on the other, the social relations of poverty which give rise to vulnerability and to unfree labour. I draw throughout on original empirical research conducted on ‘slave labour’ in Brazilian agriculture and child labour in the Delhi garments sector.     

The Politics of Postcapitalism: Labour and our Digital Futures

This article introduces the special issue on the politics of postcapitalism. Considering the theoretical foundations, empirical perspectives and political ramifications of claims made about a coming ‘post-work’ or ‘postcapitalist’ society, it maps existing debates through a discussion of two key recent texts, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It first surveys how the relationship between labour market trends, technological change and wider political-economic shifts is articulated in the postcapitalist literature. It then explores how concepts from Marx are deployed to depict social relations as a constraint on technological development and its utopian potentialities, leading to political demands for new class actors and electoral blocs centring on the new forms of economic and political activity associated with digital networks. It also considers the role of the state and how this theoretical and political approach envisions historical change, situating utopian visions of an incipient postcapitalist alternative to capitalism within the contemporary political context of authoritarian populism and challenges to liberal democracy. Finally, it explores the continuing relevance of humanism as a critical counterpoint to the social and philosophical agenda of present day ‘posthumanism’. It concludes that, in unfavourable political conditions, it would be strategically unwise to stake too much on an over-optimistic approach to the unfolding future. This outlook, it is suggested, carries considerable risks and consequences for a contemporary left in search of a viable electoral coalition and route back to power.     

The great transformation and progressive possibilities: the political limits of Polanyi's Marxian history of economic ideas

Abstract

Polanyi's The great transformation remains one of the stand-out texts of twentieth-century political economy, yet it contains important conceptual ambiguities. Perhaps most significantly, the later chapters reveal the influence of Polanyi's own notion of an ‘always embedded economy’, whereas the earlier chapters are constructed around a much more abstract notion of ‘economy’ derived from an essentially Marxian history of economic ideas. Marx worked within the basic Ricardian conception of economy as a method of immanent critique, but then proceeded also to project that same conception backwards onto pre-Ricardian traditions of economics. Polanyi did likewise, I argue, consequently missing the opportunity to connect his own ideas about the non-market influences on all market outcomes to pre-Ricardian studies of the substantive basis of functioning economic relations. I use the following pages to try to restore one such link, in this instance to Adam Smith's account of the moral ‘sympathy’ underpinning the process of market co-ordination. This reconstruction also has implications for progressive possibilities today. Polanyian responses to the ongoing crisis have tended to be framed by the basic Ricardian conception of economy and have accordingly been restricted to a discussion of more market or less, more social protection or less, more austerity or less. By contrast, tracing the lineage from pre-Ricardian concerns to Polanyi's notion of an always embedded economy allows the potentially much more radical question to be asked of what sort of economic relations today best serve essential human needs.     

Why Solidarity Matters: The Political Strategy of Welfare Design

Reporting on our recent book, The Solidarity Society, this article explores the way in which the design of welfare programmes interacts with and shapes the underlying quality of social relations between members of society—and, through this, public attitudes to welfare. Given that sustaining generous welfare over long timescales requires the support of electorates, this ‘relational’ dimension of welfare policy is crucial for the long‐term strategy of tackling poverty and inequality. The article looks in particular at the ‘welfare dilemmas’ that can arise from tensions between targeting and universalism and between need and entitlement, where the distributional and relational elements of welfare policy work against one another. We conclude that entrenching a generous welfare settlement will require strong elements of both universalism and reciprocity in the design of welfare.     

Civic Involvement and Modernization

Abstract

This paper investigates how broad processes of modernization affect individuals' relations to the civil sphere. It first introduces a model of civic involvement as a system of expectations between participants and associations. Next, the issue of change is explored. It is argued that recent social transformations, such as individualization, globalization and technology changes, undermine classic notions of civil society participation. Old types of involvement vanish, while new ones emerge. We investigate in more detail how macro-changes affect three core models of civic involvement: as a member, a volunteer and a citizen. Each model holds particular relations between adherents and associations. The conventional understanding of each model is examined in the light of ongoing processes of dis- and re-embedment of civic involvement. The paper is based on secondary analyses of literature concerned with the issue of change within the civic field. The findings can be summarized in four points. First, we observe a shift from face-to-face interaction in long-lasting civic groups towards mediated interaction within networks in flux. Falling rates of participation seem to be followed by new types outside traditional measures of civic engagement. Secondly, individuals seem to move from value-based to consumer-based relations within the civic sphere. Associations, on her hand, increasingly present her activities as ‘products’. This means that civic engagement, more often than before, is mediated in ways usually associated with the for-profit market. Thirdly, civic engagement is shifting from diffuse horizontal involvement to centrally coordinated activities. ‘Amateurism’ gradually becomes replaced by professional standards, administered by staff-led bodies, in close connection with central authorities. As a fourth conclusion, we observe a shift from an engagement mediated by associations to a direct involvement, or engagement mediated by structures that usually are not defined as civic ones.     

The big,bad wolf and the rational market: portfolio insurance,the 1987 crash and the performativity of economics

This article distinguishes two meanings of the performativity of economics, a thesis advanced by Michel Callon: ‘generic’ performativity, according to which markets and other economic relations are not to be taken as given, but as performed by economic practices; and ‘Austinian’ performativity, in which economics brings into being the relationships it describes. The two versions of performativity are explored by means of an examination of the history of portfolio insurance (a financial-market technique based on the economics of option pricing), of the 1987 stock market crash, and of subsequent efforts to diagnose the causes of the crash and to redesign the market to avoid future catastrophe. The article emphasizes the extent to which the financial markets of high modernity are designed entities, and argues that the question of their design is always a political question, even if it is seldom recognized as such.     

The political economy of education and skills in South Korea: democratisation,liberalisation and education reform in comparative perspective

The success story of Korean economic development is intimately linked with the so-called developmental state; and education policy, as part of centrally orchestrated industrial policy, played a critical role in the country's rapid industrialisation, which allowed for high employment rates, relatively modest social inequality and remarkable social mobility. However, the Korean success story has started to show ‘cracks’ – with labour market dualisation, rising inequality and ‘over-education’. While acknowledging the importance of the East Asian financial crisis as external shock for the Korean political economy, we suggest more fundamental problems in the socio-economic and socio-political underpinnings of the developmental state and its education and skills formation system for understanding how Korea's economic and education miracle turned into ‘education inflation’, skills mismatch and social polarisation.     

Financing growth in the 1990s: New challenges for OECS countries

This article argues that the world as we know it is becoming increasingly integrated and that the traditional providers of foreign assistance for infrastructure and other purposes, are about to increase the demand that poorer nations like the OECS countries must do more for themselves during the process of social development. The article admits that poorer countries like the OECS have developed revenue raising structures that facilitate indigenous development but the post-Cold War reality intensifies the need for countries like the OECS to do more for themselves than ever before. The reasons for this occurrence have been stated largely as being attributed to financial, economic, attitudinal changes in major industrial countries, particularly in North America. These changes suggest difficult limes for industrial countries in the future and are likely to have serious impacts on countries like the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). The article offers a specific approach to dealing with this anticipated demand from donor countries to do more for themselves. The author advocates the following: (1) expand the existing revenue structure of the OECS countries to include specific revenue instruments to finance new growth and development in these countries; (2) broaden the concept and practice of ‘pay-as-you-go’ to ‘pay-as-you-grow;’ (3) require new growth to pay its own way or at a minimum, to shoulder a large proportion of the cost; (4) let those who primarily benefit from new growth pay for it. ‘Impact’ or ‘development’ fees have been suggested to be a new method of financing growth, particularly in countries that are experiencing new levels of growth. The author argues that this method will not be unusual to developers-foreign investors from North America, or OECS nationals who may be returning temporarily or otherwise to their home country. This discussion on pay-as-you-grow, it is hoped, will contribute to the growing literature on Caribbean public finance.     

Late home ownership and social re-stratification

Home ownership was a significant element of social change in the post-war, mature, capitalist economies such as the United Kingdom, United States and Japan. This growth of individual home ownership occurred, however, within a particular demographic, economic, social and political context. This distinctive set of conditions include the atomized, nuclear family; suburbanization; high growth; the conventional mortgage market and a young, working population. These conditions have changed and coalesce in the constitution of what we refer to as ‘late home ownership’. The paper conceives of contrasts between ‘real estate families’ or ‘accumulating families’ which maintain or further accumulate valuable multiple property assets over generations; ‘dissipating families’ which are forced to deploy and diminish their property assets accumulated in the exceptional era; and propertyless ‘perpetual renter families’. It is argued that these emergent divisions are pivotal in understanding new forms of social re-stratification in which the patterns of ownership of residential property, the income flows from residential property investment, a changed demographics and intergenerational dynamics are key drivers.     

Multiple Worlds in a Single Street: Ethnic Entrepreneurship and the Construction of a Global Sense of Place

Doreen Massey's rethinking of space and place has made a significant contribution to the understanding of place development. In this paper, a reading of Massey's work is applied to the issue of place-making; in particular, to the question of how to improve the social and economic position of an ethnically diverse neighbourhood. The case study is of the Willemsweg, a multiethnic shopping street in Nijmegen, Netherlands, which has recently received support for a major uplift. It is pointed out that each of the place meanings adhered to by different local actors embodies a specific global sense of place, yet the consequences of this plurality of ‘trajectories’ for actual place-making remain difficult to grasp empirically. For this reason, a relational approach is elaborated which joins Massey's notion of ‘throwntogetherness’ with various meso theoretical concepts which shed light on specific trajectories.     

Marketization as political technology: unintended consequences of climate finance in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Climate finance involves the transfer of money from advanced economies into developing countries in order to contribute to carbon mitigation or climate adaptation efforts while simultaneously advancing poverty alleviation and sustainable development objectives. Dominant carbon mitigation efforts resemble what Michel Callon calls ‘civilizing markets’, a deliberate harnessing of formal markets to achieve social goals by engaging with multiple political constituencies in market design. This paper looks at carbon marketization in the Democratic Republic of Congo and finds that, despite inclusive planning, climate finance experts produce unintended consequences by assigning social and environmental goals separate strategies within a national portfolio of climate finance interventions. Resulting from the challenges of finding commensurate criteria for measuring market impacts in both social and environmental domains, this programmatic segregation obscures the interconnections between poverty, forest use and climate change in the Congo. Findings suggest a need to reconcile the design of environmental-focused markets with the difficult-to-measure embedded social benefits of informal natural resource economies.     

Making space for space

This article explores the effectiveness of appeals to ‘active citizenship’ as an answer to the ‘neoliberal’ political vocabulary of consumer choice and market freedom. It does so through a case study on recent reforms to post-compulsory education in Australia. A common response to education and social welfare policy is to expect government to accord with ideals of citizenship such as self-determination, participation and equality. However, the case study suggests that the governmental rationalities of modern mass-education systems are irreducible to these abstractions. Reference to the social rights of citizens is embedded in the rationales of social and education policy. Nevertheless, this should not be construed as the recognition or misrecognition of an absolute ideal or principle. Instead, the negotiation of social rights can be seen as the product of the mass school system's own capacity to apply common norms to a population and to use these norms in maintaining the settlements negotiated within expanding social welfare systems.     

‘Land grabbing’ or harnessing of development potential in agriculture? East Asia's land-based investments in Africa

Abstract

Large-scale foreign investment in Africa's abundant but largely underutilized arable land has been criticised by international NGOs and social movements as ‘land grabbing’, which limits access of smallholder farmers to land, deprives local people of their livelihoods and threatens local and national food security across the continent. By way of contrast, many host governments and some leading international development agencies regard land-based investments as beneficial for development in terms of providing the necessary capital and technological know-how for modernising the region's neglected agriculture including take-off in agribusiness and agro-industrialisation, which is vital to much needed economic diversification in many African countries. East Asia's participation in the global land rush on Africa is examined from the standpoint of these two different perspectives: while China's growing presence and involvement in trade and investment in mining, energy and infrastructure in Africa is well known, less recognised is its involvement and those of other East Asian countries such as South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam in agriculture through large-scale land acquisitions. The development consequences and policy implications of these foreign land-based investments are analysed from a political economy perspective, which identifies motives, interests and benefits of the different actors and addresses the question of governance in terms of transparency and appropriate institutional arrangements to safeguard land rights and food security. In the bigger picture, the paper argues that the negative consequences of land grab has to be seen alongside the benefits flowing to Africa from growing economic relations with China and other dynamic East Asian economies and learning from the development experiences of those countries. African countries however need to re-assess the current approach and relationship with foreign land-based investors and decide how best this trend can be used to forward their economic and social agendas.     

World Bank Technical Assistance: The Relational Dynamics of Policy Movement

The World Bank has been widely critiqued as a global governance actor capable of coercing and persuading its developing member countries to accept its policy recommendations. This article contributes to academic discussion by drawing upon the policy transfer and policy mobilities literatures to analyse the World Bank's two main pillars of technical assistance (TA): TA components (advisory services contained within lending operations) and stand‐alone TA projects (loans and credits that solely finance TA). Beginning from the constructivist position that ‘development’ is a social construct, the article argues that relational dynamics between TA provider and recipient affect the perception of the legitimacy of policy norms transferred from the ‘international’ to the ‘domestic’. The value added of the article is thus that policy legitimacy is not simply conferred by whether advice is technically sound but moreover through the social and political interactions—the relationship—between TA provider and recipient. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Breaking the Mould? Roy Jenkins’ ‘Radical Centre’ and British Social Democracy in the ‘New Hard Times’

Social democratic politics in Britain requires compelling answers to three animating questions that Roy Jenkins posed in his landmark 1979 Dimbleby lecture. Firstly, how can the British system of democracy be reformed to develop a culture of political participation and pluralism that leads to more equitable economic and social policies? Secondly, how can the centre‐left and left unite to forestall long periods of Tory dominance in electoral politics, thereby avoiding calamities such as the 2016 referendum on EU membership? And, thirdly, how can a flourishing intellectual ecosystem be cultivated on the progressive left that generates radical ideas for economic and social reform, recognising the importance of concerted dialogue between political traditions? This article revisits Jenkins’ 1979 lecture by considering the prospects for ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics in the ‘new hard times’ of Brexit and ‘permanent austerity’.